Care home per week versus home care per week, compared like for like

A care home is registered to carry out one regulated activity, described in law as the provision of residential accommodation together with nursing or personal care. Accommodation and care are sold together because they are regulated together, which is why the fee arrives as a single weekly number.

Care at home is the opposite arrangement. You are buying somebody's time, by the hour or by the week, into a house that is already yours. Nothing about the room, the heating or the weekly shop changes, and none of it is in the rate. So the sum that matches a care home fee is the care plus the house. The cost of care by type prices the four ways care at home is sold.

What a home has to tell you, and what counts as an unfair term, are set out in Age UK's factsheet on finding, choosing and funding a care home. Ask early: two homes ten miles apart can quote within twenty pounds of each other and include quite different things. Homes in England commonly quote between £1,100 and £1,600 a week, and the figure this page uses for a residential place, about £1,160, sits in the middle. Choosing a care home covers what to look for on the visit, and the difference between a nursing home and a care home explains which one the assessment is pointing at.

Both figures are published national ones: the average Band D council tax set by councils in England for 2026 to 2027 and the Ofgem price cap from October 2026. Somebody at home all day with the heating on uses more than the typical household the cap is measured against, so treat £33 a week as a floor rather than a forecast.

Three things can pull the council tax bill down, and none is applied automatically. Somebody living on their own gets 25% off their council tax. A live-in carer looking after somebody who is not their partner, spouse or child under 18 is disregarded when the council counts the adults in the house, so taking a live-in carer need not cost the single person discount. And where somebody has a certificate of severe mental impairment from their GP and qualifies for certain benefits, the discount can be 100% if they live on their own, 50% where everybody else in the house is disregarded, and 25% for the household where somebody lives with them. The costs people forget covers the rest of the household side.

Read the notes beside the bars first, because the amount of care in each week is not the same. Two one-hour visits a day is £348 a week all in, a long way below a care home place, and it leaves fourteen hours of the day and the whole of the night with nobody there. That suits somebody who manages between visits, and it is not a like-for-like alternative to a care home.

The two arrangements that do cover a whole week are live-in care and a care home place, and they land close together. A typical live-in week with the household costs added is £1,188 against about £1,160 for a residential place, so at the typical rate live-in care is the dearer of the two by a small margin. At the bottom of the live-in range it is £1,118, a little under the care home figure. Anybody who tells you one is clearly cheaper than the other for a single person is rounding something. Against a nursing home at about £1,410 the gap opens up, and whether live-in care is cheaper than a care home has a calculator that takes your own bills, pensions and savings.

For a couple the comparison changes decisively. One live-in carer looking after two people is about £1,350 a week, and with the full Band D average and energy the household total is £1,429. Two care home places at the residential average are £2,320, and the couple would be in two rooms rather than one house. Live-in care or residential care for couples goes through it properly.

The working. A residential place is about £1,160 a week. The household costs the fee already covers come to £68 at home, so the matching care budget is £1,160 less £68, or £1,092. Divide that by the carer's hourly rate and you have the hours.

One figure needs handling carefully, because it appears across this site and is easy to misread. Pages about hours quote about 35 hours a week as the point to start looking at live-in care. That is a point about cover, not about price. 35 hours of visits is £630 to £875 a week depending on the rate, and a live-in week starts at £1,050, so the money has not crossed over at 35 hours and it is not close. What has happened by then is that three visits a day plus the weekly jobs has filled the diary while most of the day and all of the night stay uncovered. The point where live-in care becomes cheaper than hourly visits works through the arithmetic with different weekly patterns.

The summary, then. On price for a single person, visits are cheaper than a care home until the hours get high, live-in care and a residential place are within a few tens of pounds of each other, and a nursing home is dearer than both. On cover, 55 hours of visits and a care home place are not the same week. If you still need to settle the hours, how many visits a week does my parent need builds the week from the tasks.

The row families underestimate is cover. A care home carries the staffing risk: when somebody calls in sick at six in the morning, that is the home's problem and the rota still happens. At home it is yours. A live-in carer needs a daily break and takes leave across the year, and somebody has to be with your relative for those hours. Read what a live-in carer's daily break involves and what the alternatives to live-in care are before you plan a week that assumes nobody is ever ill.

The house cuts the other way. It is familiar, it holds the routine and the neighbours, and staying in it is what many people say they want. It may also need work that no care figure includes, such as a stairlift, a wet room or a downstairs bed. A council can help: a Disabled Facilities Grant in England is worth up to £30,000, and how much you get usually depends on household income and savings over £6,000. When home care stops being enough is the page to read if you are asking whether you are there.

1. 1

   The house is counted for a care home, and disregarded at home

   The biggest single difference

   For care at home the value of the home is disregarded if your relative still lives there. For a permanent care home placement it can be counted as capital, though it is disregarded for the first 12 weeks, and their share can be disregarded for longer where a partner or, in certain circumstances, a relative still lives there. A deferred payment agreement can postpone a sale.
2. 2

   The savings limits are the same in both settings

   £23,250 and £14,250

   In England the upper capital limit is £23,250, and above it your relative pays the full cost. Capital between £14,250 and £23,250 produces £1 a week of tariff income for every £250, and capital below £14,250 is left out. What counts as capital changes with the setting.
3. 3

   What your relative is left to live on is very different

   £31.80 against £241.45 a week

   In a care home the council must let your relative keep a Personal Expenses Allowance of at least £31.80 a week, because the fee already covers the room and the meals. For care at home the Minimum Income Guarantee in 2026/27 is £241.45 a week for a single person over State Pension age, because a house still has to be run.
4. 4

   Check the benefits before you decide anything

   Free to ask

   Attendance Allowance is not means-tested and can be spent on a carer. Your relative can still claim it if they pay all their care home costs themselves, but usually not if a council pays for the place. In a nursing home the NHS pays a nursing contribution straight to the home, £267.68 a week from 1 April 2026. Where the main need is a health one, NHS Continuing Healthcare can fund the whole package in either setting.

Those figures come from Age UK on paying for care and support at home and paying for permanent residential care, the NHS on NHS-funded nursing care and when the council might pay, and gov.uk on claiming Attendance Allowance. They reset each April.

All of which is why a financial assessment is worth asking for even where your relative will plainly pay for their own care. The answer about the house alone can be worth more than any difference between the weekly figures here. Local authority funding explains the needs assessment and the financial assessment that follows, and NHS Continuing Healthcare explains who qualifies for a fully funded package.